Konstantine’s smile doesn’t falter, but it softens into something that might, on another man, pass for sympathy. He draws a low breath; the sound exaggerated in the quiet hall. “She is alive, Antonio. And I have it on good authority that your child will live. You have a boy.” He lets the word hang there for a beat, watching me. “Sure he will need a little help these first few months, but he’s a fighter already, just like his parents. Just like his dad.”
The world tilts. The roaring in my ears recedes, replaced by a single, piercing tone.
A boy.
I have a son? I have a son.
The information lands not with joy, but with a seismic, terrifying thud in my soul. A son. A tiny, vulnerable life that is mine to protect in a world that I know to be viciously, randomly cruel. The weight of it is immense, a gravitational pull that threatens to buckle my knees.
I am a father. I am a father!
The monumental truth is still settling over me, a blanket of awe and sheer terror when the doors to the operating theatre swing open. A surgeon emerges, still in his blue scrubs, a cap masking his hair. His face is etched with a deep fatigue but his eyes, his eyes hold a light that wasn’t there before.
He pulls off his mask. “Mr Macrae?”
I’m across the corridor in three strides, Devin and Konstantine forgotten. “Yes.”
“Your wife is stable,” he says, and the words are a key unlocking the iron bands around my chest. I sway on my feet, grabbing the wall for support. “It was touch and go. We’ve induced a coma to give her body and brain time to heal without any additional stress. She’ll need to remain under for a few weeks.”
A coma. The relief is brutal and incomplete.
“And her eye?” I hear myself ask. She blew the right side of her face off. Did they stitch it back together like a patchwork quilt?
The surgeon offers a small, genuine smile. “We managed to save her sight. The trauma was significant, but the optic nerve was intact. There will be recovery, rehabilitation, but the prognosis is good.”
Tears I didn’t know I was capable of well up, hot and blinding. I blink them back furiously, refusing to let them fall. Not here. Not in front of them. But the gratitude is a physical pain. “Thank you. Doctor. Thank you.”
He nods, weary but satisfied. “You can see her in a moment. She’s been moved to ICU.”
“I want to see her. Now.”
He gestures for me to follow. I don’t look back at the two men I left standing in the corridor. My entire being is focused on the doors, on the path to my wife.
But as I step across the threshold, a cold prickle, entirely separate from the fear and the relief travels down my spine.
I glance back.
Devin and Konstantine are still there, watching me go. Devin is a statue, unreadable as ever. But Konstantine, he stands perfectly straight, his hands clasped behind his back, a portrait of victorious authority.
And the thought comes, unbidden, a tiny splinter in my mind.
Konstantine doesn’t stand like that.
The memory is crisp, clear. The last time I saw him, he’d leaned ever so slightly to the left, a subtle but permanent favouring of his right side.
This man in the hallway stands with a ramrod, symmetrical straightness.
The splinter digs deeper, festering.
Surely that’s not…No, the thought is too absurd to finish but it takes root anyway, a seed of doubt in the freshly turned soil of my reality.
I turn my back on them, the question burning a hole in my mind, and follow the doctor into the intensive care unit, into the humming, beeping sanctuary where my wife lies waiting.
The outside world, with its lies and its shadows, can wait.
The only sounds are the low, rhythmic hiss of the ventilator forcing breath into her lungs and the steady, electronic ping of the heart monitor.
She lies in the bed, a small mound of a person beneath starched white sheets, dwarfed by the machinery that is keeping her tethered to this world. To me.
